CHAPTER 8: GENERATION NEXT
“The purpose of this organization is to develop a family playground where members may gather without formal restraint.” — George Ross, December 1923.
The great game of golf. The poolside fun. The lavish parties. Those one-armed bandits. And, of course, the generous Short Hills pours.
All of these are imprinted in the DNA of 100 years of history at the club on the East Moline hilltop.
More than anything, however, real DNA, that love-of-club-and-golf gene passed down from fathers and mothers to sons and daughters, is the true life force behind a century of good times at Short Hills Country Club.
​
Across 10 full decades, succeeding generations stepped to the tee to ensure that the oldest country club in the Quad Cities grew, flourished, battled change and challenge, and began to grow again.
Clifford and Izzie Smith begat Jim Smith. Hank and Jeanne Davis begat Marty Davis. Stony and Geri Vanderbeke begat Marc Vanderbeke. Art and Joanne Holmes begat Dave Holmes. And, on it goes, as dozens of engaged, active, and loyal sons and daughters of Short Hills prepare to celebrate 100 years of historic fun in 2022.
As the current membership director and someone who has served many years in multiple board and committee capacities, Dave Holmes is honoring more than his father’s many decades at Short Hills. Dave also honors the many fathers and mothers of others who fed his passion for golf on the hilltop playground in his youth and beyond.
“Kenny Roman is going to be the first guy I’m going to tell you I looked up to out here because he was one of the influential old guys when I was really starting to pick up the game,” Holmes said. “Kenny was just the old codger you’d see out here, and he’s got the persimmon 7-wood and he’s playing golf balls that he found in the woods left on 10. Took his showers out here. One of those old dynamos that were always around the golf course.
“I looked up to Steamer. I looked up to longtime head pro Bob Van Fleet. Dr. Tom Washburn was another guy like Kenny Roman. Older, just a traditional golfer. Straight, didn’t overpower the course but just did all the small things right.
“I won my first Velie Cup match with John Carpentier. I looked up to Tom Bracke. Marc VanderBeke. I looked up to Fred Lukasik. When 1990 came around and I graduated from Iowa, I joined Short Hills on my own membership because I looked up to those guys. Brent Haydon and Clay Lee, I have a sneaking suspicion they looked up a little to me.”
Dave has held nearly every board position to honor the work Art Holmes, Jim Christiansen, Steamer Fulton, and countless others selflessly invested in carrying Short Hills through its first century.
“I have been everything but treasurer,” he said. “It can be a big commitment of time if you’re on the board. If you’re here, there’s always something going on. As president, I was coming out here six days a week for various things. If I couldn’t sleep, I found myself at 1 or 1:30 in the morning driving here to make sure the doors were locked.”
Scott Christiansen is another third-generation member who grew up playing junior golf with Holmes and Joe Irwin. He later played on conference, regional and sectional champion Moline High School golf squads alongside those fellow Shorties.
“From kindergarten on, it’s what I can remember,” Christiansen said of a lifetime affiliation with the club. “There’s the family history, but also the lifelong friends that we’ve met out here. Friends we’ve literally had for 40 years. Our kids grew up together. Now, they have lifelong friendships, our kids with their kids. Business relationships. I could go on and on.”
Because Scott feels honor-bound to do his part to ensure the club his grandfather and father loved lives on, he didn’t hesitate to step up a decade ago when the board was looking for a working chair to guide the restoration of the Pavilion that serves today as both a formal dining room and an informal gathering space.
The modern and bright Pavilion stands in stark contrast to the rest of the second-floor clubhouse, those dated, oak-paneled rooms that served the club so well as stately hosts to the swank and lively soirees that made the Short Hills the place to be in the mid-20th Century.
Scott was a child of 5 when his grandfather died during that family dinner in the old dining room. It happened in a spot mere feet from the Pavilion the grandson stepped up to help renovate.
“He would love that this place is still around,” L.C. Christiansen’s grandson said of a 100-year-old Short Hills. “It would be neat if he could see it. Maybe he does.”
Maybe George Ross and the original founding fathers are smiling as Short Hills turns 100, too. After all, their vision for a family playground made Short Hills great, and keeps it great today.
“Anything we get involved with I might treat it a little more seriously than others,” the younger Christiansen said of the essential work any club requires of its members. “I treat it like my house for those reasons because I’ve been out here my whole life.
“I might go an extra step, but there are a lot of good members who bend over backward to try and help this place thrive.”
The bright and airy Pavilion provides a modern club gathering space.
Members Step Up
​
Indeed, family heritage is not a prerequisite for impassioned Short Hills leadership. First-generation members like Steve Nelson, who joined his partners in the Bozeman, Neighbor, Patton, and Noe law firm as a member in 1980, are equally invested.
​
Today, Nelson is in year three of his second stint as board president. In league with Bob Larsen, a corporate accountant who has served as club treasurer for more than half of his 27 years at Short Hills, Nelson’s professional skills helped the club find access to low-interest loans that accelerated needed improvements in the midst COVID-19 pandemic two years ago.
​
Along with a renewed interest in the COVID-safe outdoor activity of golf and the steady return of young families owed in part to the pandemic, the affordable loans helped avoid member assessments and enhanced the club’s financial standing.
​
“We are in a much better financial position than we’ve been in probably the last 15 to 20 years,” Larsen reported.
​
It’s not the first time the varied professional skills successful members brought to the table proved helpful on the hilltop. The Murphy brothers saved the club untold dollars by providing equipment, moving dirt, and shaping holes during the wholesale course renovation that was completed in 2000.
​
In 2007, member Dave Johnson, whose golf course construction business had grown into one of the region’s busiest, donated his services to totally rebuild and re-contour greens on the front nine. That included adding a false front to make No. 8 even more dastardly, and building a finger addition to No. 9 green, bringing the lake even more into play with a challenging back-right pin position.
As chair of the grounds committee, Ed Casel, another first-gen Shortie, has in each of the past three springs enlisted the text string that summons interested golfers to the tee on summer Saturdays to instead create work parties to clean up a winter’s worth of mess in preparation for another season of fun.
In the dead of this past winter, a large work party turned out to do the grimy and back-breaking work of tearing up old carpet from the men’s locker room and pro shop to make way for new. The response was automatic and gratifying.
In place of privilege, membership at Short Hills has its obligations. And those have been readily and steadily fulfilled.
Mary Jensen and a familiar customer.
The Rest of the Family
From the beginning, of course, staff have handled the bulk of the work of maintaining the club and enhancing the member experience. More than mere employees, those good and familiar folks are Short Hills family, too, and their place within the hilltop’s history is long and rich.
From the pro shop to the maintenance barn, from the kitchen to the poolside, from the barroom to the bag room, management and staff are, and long have been, full-fledged members of the Short Hills family.
The names of pro shop legends such as Waldo Johnson, John Paul Jones, Jim Yavenue, Bob Van Fleet, and Mike Downing long will live in Short Hills lore. Remembered too are superintendents such as Jeff Scott, Jason Snyder, Tim Beckman, and Tom VandeWalle. The latter’s skill at growing grass on the hilltop took him from here to a long run grooming prestigious Bellrive Country Country Club in St. Louis, home to PGA Championship wins by Nick Price and Brooks Koepka.
At Short Hills, VandeWalle is remembered as a great keeper of greens. And as a stern protector of fish.
“He was a tough guy but a good greenskeeper,” remembered Vanderbeke, who fished the pond on 11 as a boy with a neighborhood friend. “Unbeknownst to us, they stocked that pond. One day we’d caught a bunch of bass, and a couple of bluegills. Tom came zooming around the corner on the cart path and he let us have it. ‘You don’t take the fish out of there!’ He tried to put them back.”
Today, Short Hills contracts Green Golf Partners, a management firm in the Troon network that oversees staff and operations for 35 courses across 13 states. Management firms like Green Golf are an increasingly popular option in the industry, offering cost control and bulk-purchase efficiencies.
In addition to taking the onus off the board for hiring, handling payroll, keeping books, and managing billing and budget, Green Golf’s affiliation with Troon Prive’ also provides Short Hills members affordable access to 180 private clubs and courses in the Troon network. Included in that lineup are such notable tracks as Troon North in Arizona, Kapalua in Hawaii, Silverado in California, Tiburon in Florida and Kemper Lakes near Chicago.
“It’s a great benefit more members should take advantage of,” said Casel.
While the arrangement means folks like General Manager Gary Manes, Head Professional Ryan McClintock, and Superintendent Pat Franklin aren’t technically employed by the club, they still take direction from the board, and serve the membership in the same dedicated ways Tom Campagna, Waldo Johnson, and Tom VandeWalle once did.
Indeed, they and the entire staff remain integral parts of the hilltop playground’s character. That certainly includes Mary Jensen, who has been among those tending to the infamous Short Hills pours for more than 20 years. You can bet she has a tale or two to tell.
“We could turn this place into a sitcom,” she shared. “We’ve got a cast of characters.”
Jensen isn’t about to name names, of course. Like the man said, you never take sides against the family. And staff members are, and forever have been, part of the Short Hills clan.
“Short Hills was a good place to work. It was family,” Lynn Downey attested. “The members treated you very well, and you had fun. You share in their memories. You spent a lot of time there. You celebrated weddings with them. You celebrated their birthdays and anniversaries. You were there for their funeral luncheons. You have a lot of memories with a lot of members. To this day, I’ll see members somewhere, and it's like Old Home Week. They don’t forget you.”
​
Generation Next
As its centennial summer dawns, Short Hills Country Club will build its future by celebrating its past with a new generation of literally short Shorties.
The June Party returns in all its glory on June 11. With a Great Gatsby theme, great food in abundance, and equally abundant Short Hills pours, that’s an event sure to resurrect grand recollections of a decidedly adult-style hilltop playground.
New memories, though, also will be built for the newest generation of sons and daughters of Short Hills on that anniversary weekend, and over the course of a full-blown centennial summer celebration. Steve Ducey, chair of a re-energized Family and Entertainment Committee, will see to that.
Ducey’s childhood memories of the hilltop playground were influenced by Short Hills parents who weren’t his own.
“I didn’t grow up a member out here, but I had a lot of friends that did, and as a kid, I was out here a lot,” he said. “So, I have a lot of passion for this place. I have a lot of fond memories with a lot of people”
His mission now is to create equally strong memories for his son and daughter and countless other Short Hills kids. As important is setting an example for stepping up to help the club
“The notion of being family-friendly is super important, but we have to remember it’s a member-owned club and it’s our responsibility as members to make it great,” he said. “Growing young family memberships is important to the long-term success of the club.”
Steve and Kelly Ducey’s son Liam is active in the junior golf program and daughter Clare is about to be. More to the point, family time together at the pool is precious for the Duceys and so many other young families. Coming out of the pandemic, Steve sees a “Cat’s in the Cradle” kind of opportunity to remind young parents that quality family moments spent beyond the youth sports sidelines matter now more than ever.
Those moments will matter in ways more profound as those kids grow up and those parents grow older.
Jon Fox can attest to that. As a second-generation Shortie, his sentimental childhood recollections of weekly Sunday evening rounds played with his father, Dennis, carry special currency as both men age.
“Such good memories of being with my dad out here, one on one, and we’d walk nine holes, stock cars in the background. We talked about everything but golf. School. Girls,” Jon remembered. “True story: I was out here on the front 9 and my Dad told me, ‘Don’t screw it up. Ask Heather to marry you.’”
Jon did indeed propose. At Short Hills. And 30 happily married years and two kids later, Father Fox clearly knew best.
“My Dad didn’t play much golf,” Jon said. “He didn’t love it. But it was an opportunity to be one-on-one, me with my Dad. It was awesome. It was never about the golf with my Dad. It was about the opportunity to be out here, together.”
Clay Lee likewise has many happy memories of coming of age on the hilltop in the company of his parents, Graham and Patti. Even if Mom never let him win.
“She beat me like a drum for as long as I can remember, and then all my friends were like ‘What’s it like getting beat by a girl?’” Clay recalled. “That’s what I knew since I was 8 so it didn’t bother me. It happened a lot. I mean the tide has turned. I get the better of her 8 out of 10 times now.”
As her son grew into the game, Patti said Short Hills was a virtual and trustworthy nanny.
“It was Clay’s second home,” she said of the club. “He’d ride his bike over there, and I’d have to call the pro shop and have somebody send him home for supper. We never worried about him. I knew where he was and what he was doing. He was outside, active, carrying his bag, walking. That is something this club brings to families.”
These days, the generational tug of golf at the oldest course and club in the Quad Cities is particularly powerful as Clay’s own two children reach the age he was when took up the game and played until the pro shop called him home.
“My son is 9 and he’s getting into golf,” he said. “My younger two are getting into it. That’s going to be the next step. Getting the kids into it. What I did with my parents growing up, all the parent-child events, I’m really looking forward to doing that with my kids as we grow up.”
That’s the family playground George Ross had in mind a century ago. Now, we enter a second century at the hilltop place where Ross and fellow founders made it possible "to touch elbows in community thinking, community purposes, community activities and, above all, community personality.”
​
Isn’t it fun to imagine the tales the Ducey and Lee kids, and all of today’s shortest Shorties, will tell when the playground on the East Moline hilltop turns 150?
​